blox_cardsfandomcom-20200214-history
User blog:L1242092/Nerfing Lunar
In the past few days, I haven't played very much Blox Cards. I know that the next Christmas event is coming up, and I'm excited to pick up some new alt arts, especially now that I've built several decks that some of the old ones can fit into. I've been building up BB for a while though, so I don't feel any pressure to grind out some games against players right now in anticipation. When I did show up though, I started to hear murmurs of something very sensitive to my ears: Lunar is getting a nerf. Now, it's no secret how much I enjoy playing Lunar. It's the first kind of deck I really got into after getting away from the starter deck. It was interesting too, because I seem to have joined Blox Cards at a time when people looked at Lunar with contempt and didn't want to play it, and I couldn't understand how they could miss out. I've been happy to play Lunar decks for most of my time in the game and not felt much reason to go outside of that except to make other decks in avoided archetypes. The control style of Lunar that I've mostly stuck with though doesn't seem to be the problem. It's the Lunar OTK deck that certain people don't like. I'm going to share my views on the potential nerfs to Lunar here based on a discussion I had between myself, tl_rd, Myrmiredon, and peanut gallery comments by Blue2Shroom. I don't use Discord, so this will have to suffice. ---- The Problem: Hyperburn (Lunar OTK) is too consistent. ...or so claims tl_rd. I've never built a Hyperburn deck and only watched damarioguy play his version. Something about the way the deck plays, leaving no boardstate much of the time and praying for a string of actions that can burn down the opponent, is too vulnerable for my blood. I also didn't realize it was consistent, because from what I could tell, many decks could put out fighters that challenge the deck's early fighters and starve it of a chance to build icons. Apparently, that's still all made possible thanks to one card. Proposal 1: Nerf Forbidden Power. Method 1: Reduce blue and red icon gain to two each. This was brought up by Myrm when he was trying to remember how it (Lunar) was decided to be nerfed (for which he was apparently not part of the decision or discussion process). This version of FP is unplayable. The best use of FP right now in Lunar decks is to be able to play it on your first turn when you have no board. Doing so requires discarding a blue and other red card. For this, you get two new cards from your deck, another blue and red icon, some life, and a Nightmare for your opponent. This is great upside. Nerfing it to two icons, however, means you would be discarding those two cards for two other cards with no extra icons to show for it, just some life and a Nightmare for your opponent. This is almost like playing a card with no cost that wipes your board, gives your opponent a Nightmare, and gives you 500 life. That might be playable somewhere, but it wouldn't be playable in Lunar of any kind. The question is: how does this nerf Hyperburn? If any Hyperburn decks have this in their main deck, they just drop it and play something else. If they draw it off Erik.Cassel or TheSteelEagle, they don't even play the current version then, so nerfing it doesn't do anything there either. Method 1.5: Reduce blue and red icon gain to three each. Instead of going back to two icons each, the card would just refund its cost here. Potentially playable by Lunar decks still, but also doesn't hurt Hyperburn much. Method 2: End the turn when played. This proposal is the one that seems to currently be on the books. Lunar is already an archetype that struggles to get to a decent board state, as many of its fighters have no power or high/awkward costs. Forbidden Power helps make it happen by granting the icons necessary to play some of these fighters, but ending the turn stops all of that. If a Lunar deck wipes its own board and gives initiative back to the opponent, it's asking to be given no opportunity to set up a board ever. This does little to nothing in terms of stopping Hyperburn because that deck is even okay with having no board state for a few turns. If it has to spread out its uses of Forbidden Power across two turns and then play fighters, that may not be much different than it playing two FPs in one turn and waiting two turns to play any fighter. Also, it's not as though Hyperburn ever stops in the middle of its combo to play FP now, so the turn-ending effect has zero impact once the deck goes off. This change will, however, kill the card in any Lunar deck that isn't OTK, because those decks rely on being able to set up a board state, which this change would deny from them. So, it's no nerf to Hyperburn, but a nerf to all other Lunar decks. Method 3: Put two random blue or red actions into the hand instead of drawing two cards. Proposed by tl_rd as a way to make the card more Lunar focused. This proposal is mostly okay, but allowing Forbidden Power to generate more copies of itself opens the card up to creating chains that heavily swing games. These kinds of chains are already apparent in cards like PEEPSTERS, Toy Truck, Overseer Drake, and Swarm, and it's a pain to deal with those as well. Plus, Hyperburn is probably the variant of Lunar that appreciates actions the most, so this card would either be more of a benefit or less of a nerf to Hyperburn than to other Lunar decks. Method 4: Take 600-700 damage instead of gaining 500 life. Suggested by Myrm. This suggestion possibly has some merit, as most Lunar decks probably care more about getting the icons than getting any sort of life. The area where this suggestion really shines, particularly against Hyperburn, is the situation where Forbidden Power ends up being the one randomly generated by several cards. FP chains on an empty board currently gain the Lunar player a fair chunk of life, and while this may not be very significant, a huge life loss from an FP chain would be a considerable event, especially against the board-light Hyperburn deck. This hurts all Lunar decks, but might just hurt Hyperburn the most. Claim: Forbidden Power is strong in decks other than Blue/Red. tl_rd tried to say this was the case, and Blue2Shroom also felt the same way. However, I could not think of a single monoblue or monored deck where somebody tried to splash into the other color in order to play Forbidden Power and achieved better results from doing so. I know it's not a comprehensive list, but I looked through various red or blue decks in the Decks category and couldn't find a single mostly blue or red deck that had apparently splashed in order to play Forbidden Power. Several blue/red decks don't even run the card, if you can believe it. Either these decklists are all terrible, or it's not as universally good a card as claimed. Verdict: Nerfing Forbidden Power is not the answer. Forbidden Power is strong accelerant to any Lunar deck. However, if the problem with Lunar has to do with Hyperburn and not other decks of the archetype, then the answer is not to nerf FP, but to nerf other cards specific to Hyperburn. Given many of the proposals or plans for nerfing FP, the fate of the card would often be to not run it in Lunar decks, which would mean it wouldn't be run anywhere, and would only be discarded for a red icon when generated. There are likely better avenues for hitting Hyperburn than killing FP, which I don't believe would harm Hyperburn that much anyways. Proposal 2: Nerf PassTheToiletPaper and/or mrawesomecarter. Suggested by tl_rd. These two cards are the primary damage dealers of Hyperburn and what ultimately allows the deck to exist. The other cards that form the framework around them - Erik.Cassel, TheSteelEagle, Lebron, Tomspick, and various cheap actions and terrains - may have use in other decks, but these two cards are pretty much specific to Hyperburn. PTTP is the easier of the two to cast due to partially costing white, deals more damage, has a high health pool that lets it live through playing Inferno, and triggers off actions from both players. Between the two cards, if one was to be made significantly worse, it would be this one. Changing the cost wouldn't hurt Hyperburn much after it gets over that initial hump. Messing with its health pool also has little impact, though shrinking that to where it dies to its own Inferno can potentially slow down the deck or require finding a Bloated or Fallen Guardian to play onto it first. Changing it to only trigger off opponent's actions relegates it into being only a Lunar counter. Cutting down the damage can make a big difference in how far the deck can go in dealing damage. A drop from 300 to 200, considering other actions that deal damage, may cut the deck's damage potential when it goes off by 20-25%. Assuming the damage path is the way to go, mrawesomecarter could receive similar treatment. The other option would be to give PTTP or mrawesomecarter a total rework of some kind, but I'll leave it up to other people to decide what that would look like. Something like Regular_Talkshow's effect that hits all fighters might be a decent pivot. Or, perhaps PTTP could lose some amount of health every time an action is cast, meaning it would expire after a few triggers and need buffing through some other action, and it would also allow any chip damage done to it from fighters to further hamper its effectiveness. Proposal 3: Rework Erik.Cassel and TheSteelEagle to have a trigger limit. Another suggestion by tl_rd. I don't like the idea very much because I don't see how you limit the number of times they trigger enough to stop Hyperburn and still expect something like Stormchaser's Gambit to ever reach 7 again. It would also hurt the potential of those cards in other Lunar decks that try to get triggers from them across several turns rather than at once. Perhaps some scaling system like Stormchaser's Gambit that doesn't kill off Cassell or TSE, but gives back another copy at the end of each turn with refreshed charges would work, but that would also be hard on ever making Stormchaser's work or take up precious board space from the Lunar player. ---- I'm running out of steam to continue with this topic, so I'll just end here. I really enjoy playing my Lunar decks and I'll be sad if they end up getting nerfed due to another deck in the archetype that I hardly see, don't find to be that consistent, and is likely to hurt my decks more than it will hurt that one. Category:Blog posts Category:Blog posts